Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a regulator apparatus, in particular a regulator apparatus with a Darlington structure with a small residual voltage for regulators with a very small voltage drop.
Regulators serve to stabilize a desired value, for example an output voltage or an output current. An actuator, which is usually a (power) semiconductor component in the form of a transistor, is influenced by a manipulated variable derived from the difference between an actual value, for example a specific fraction of the output voltage or of the output current, and the desired value, for example in the form of a reference voltage.
Continuous regulators can be embodied as series or in-phase regulators or as parallel regulators, depending on the configuration of the actuator. In practice, series regulators are used considerably more frequently than parallel regulators. In the case of series regulation or series stabilization, the actuator is connected in series with the load, while the actuator is connected in parallel with the load in the case of parallel regulation or parallel stabilization. Parallel regulators have a lower efficiency than series regulators, since they exhibit a full power consumption in no-load operation as well. A further disadvantage of parallel regulators compared with series regulators is that the transistor used as the actuator has to take up the full output voltage.